QUOTES

Thinking is where your mouth stays shut and your head keeps talking to itself    (unknown)

Higher  order thinking skills are  not taught as a separate  skills curriculum.  Instead, they are developed .. within  contexts that call for students to relate what they are learning to their lives outside of school by thinking critically or creatively about it or by using it to solve problems or make decisions.   (Brophy 1992)

The pupil’s role is not to absorb or copy but to actively make sense and construct meaning  (Brophy 1992) 

Young children learn best when they become active workers rather than passive learners.

They make more progress… when they are permitted to work together in groups to solve complex tasks, allowed to engage in class discussions and taught to argue convincingly for their approach in the midst of conflicting ideas and strategies. Even young children can do these things well with a little encouragement (Harriet Tyson  1990)

Students learn best by doing, and doing is best when it is lifelike – When it involves engagement with real or near real problem solving.   (Sergiovanni  1995)

The greatest enemy of understanding is coverage. As long as you are determined to cover everything, you actually ensure that most kids are   not going to understand. You have to spend enough time to get kids involved in something so that they can think about it in lots of different ways and apply it – not just at school but at home and on the street and so on.  (Brandt   1993)

The purpose.. is to move students away from being absorbers of information to being processors, synthesisers, creators and users of information (Sergiovanni  1995)

Too often we give pupils answers to remember rather than problems to solve  (unknown)

The sooner teachers are seen as knowledge workers, professional educators and leaders, the sooner schools will improve. (Stenhouse  1984)

Quality Professional Development  should be a process, not an event. (Unknown)

There are 3 waves of school reform. Doing the same, but more of it. Doing the same, but doing it better. Re-structuring and re-designing the system.  (Peter Holly 1990)

An effective school is one in which pupils progress further than might be expected from consideration of its intake.  (Mortimer 1991)

A school is either improving or it is getting worse (Stoll and Fink 1995)

Although all change is not improvement,   All improvement involves change. (Fullan 1992)

Ultimately school improvement comes from within and cannot be externally mandated. (Barth 1990)

Nothing so professionalises work in schools as educators who create within the schoolhouse visions of good education. (Barth 1990)

Vision is the shared values and beliefs of a group of people: Mission is the articulation of these values in Goal setting and purpose.  (Block 1987)

If there is any centre to the mystery of school’s success, mediocrity, or failure… it is a shared sense among its members about what they are trying to accomplish. (Rosenholtz 1998)

COLLEGIALITY. Difficult to spell, Hard to pronounce, Harder to define. Involves mutual sharing and assistance, an orientation towards the school as a whole, and is spontaneous, voluntary, development orientated, unscheduled and unpredictable. (Bart 1990)

Often the seemingly ordinary and little stuff of management is the vehicle for the leader’s message.  (Southworth 1994)

Leadership is about communicating invitational messages to individuals and groups with whom leaders interact to build and act on a shared and evolving vision of enhanced educational experiences for pupils. (Stoll and Fink 1995)

It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead.. and to find no one there.  (Franklin Roosevelt 1937) 

If teachers taught everything that was thought to be of value, school systems would need to have a retirement plan for pupils. (Stoll & Fink 1995)

It has been said that schools are places where pupils go to watch adults work.  (Stoll & Fink 1995)

Probably nothing in a school has more impact on students in terms of skills development, self-confidence, or classroom behaviour than the personal and professional growth of their teachers

(Barth 1990)

If teachers want their children to breathe in new ideas they must reveal themselves to children as learners.  (Barth 1990)

A cruel irony is that there is very little evidence that external assessments actually improve the quality of education. In fact there is substantially more evidence of their negative effects on teaching.  (Hayden et al 1991)

What gets measured, or assessed, gets valued. If schools do not measure what they value, what others choose to measure will be valued.  (Stoll & Fink 1995)

Learning consistently takes place when critical thinking is combined with relevance'  (Kindsvatter 1991).

There is a paradigm shift from planning based on teacher intentions to planning directed towards pupil outcomes.   (Stoll & Fink 1995)

A teacher’s task is only to provide the best possible environment, Not to guarantee that the results will be effective no matter how little effort is made by the students   (Scriven 1981) 

Children have more need of models than of critics.  (Joseph Joubert)

We teachers and others are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. We think we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning it into a string of words or actions transplant it whole into the mind of someone else…”       (John Holt, in Sotto q.v.) 

There is always, especially among parents, a kind of nostalgia for the schooling which seemed to serve them so well when they were young, but which belongs now to an outdated paradigm (Beare 2000)

Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.  (Neil Postman)